Book Review: Fuckhead (David Rawson)Reviewed by Michael Northen When he said I would never understand his experience, I reminded him I have lived with VATER Syndrome
my entire life. His response: "When are you going to stop hiding behind that? You're not disabled. You're just
a fuckhead."
As a journal of disability and literature, Wordgathering's dual mission puts it in a bit of a unique position. On the one hand, like Kaledioscope and Breath and Shadow, it hopes to offer its readers quality emerging work in genre literature. At the same time, however, it strives to contribute to disability theory as it relates to literature in the vein of such academic journals as Disability Studies Quarterly and Britain's Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. This bifurcation is played out in the books received by Wordgathering for review. While it is true that some literary novels such as Jillian Weise's The Colony and Susan Nussbaum's Good Kings, Bad Kings also serve as criticism and scholarly collections like Kathryn Allan's Disability in Science Fiction have literary subjects, these books by in large remain in the camp in which they were created. Therefore, when a book comes along that seeks to unify these two approaches, it is worth taking a look at. David Rawson's pocket-sized Fuckhead (Punctum Books, 2013) is that kind of book. A quick look at Rawson's table of contents with four main parts and three codas (not to mention an "Interlude" pointed placed between them) , makes it clear that he wants readers to keep the form of a classical symphony in mind as a reference. Unlike Gretchen Henderson's The House Enters the Street, where musical structure is integral to the meaning of the book, Rawson's purpose is to alert readers to the fact that while this essay has a formal structure with themes that will continually resurface, it is not strictly narrative. Two main strands run through Fuckhead . The first is Rawson's life as a person with VATER syndrome. The second is an exploration of several well known literary works in which a main character has a cognitive disability or, in Rawson's words, is a fuckhead. What is the function of a fuckhead in literature how does understanding that shed light on his own experience? The two themes are never far from each other but the first of the books four movements focuses on the biographical strand and it is here that the reader is introduced to VATER syndrome. In Rawson's case: I was born with my spinal cord wrapped around my vertebrae, causing a benign tumor; a club foot, bent 90 degrees to the left; the last three toes of each foot fused together; most of my small intestine missing; and an imperforated anus. I had a colostomy bag until I was four. But, as the author describes, the relatively rare syndrome can manifest itself in a number of ways. The narrative set up here is not just the author's experiences as a person living with this condition. As the introductory quote above suggests, Rawson and his brother are not on the best of terms. The immediate cause is that the author has co-opted his brother's experiences as a cancer patient to create a central character in a novel, which unbeknownst to his brother is published. Understandably, his unnamed brother takes exception, prompting Rawson's defensive statement. Of course, it is a fatuous one, rather like saying that because I am African American I know what it is like to be a Jewish holocaust survivor. What it does open up is a conversation about just who has the authority to writer about cancer, VATER syndrome or any other disability and from what perspective. In his own defense, the narrator's reaction is to claim the freedom of the artist, but as the book continues, it is obvious that not even he is convinced of this position. This is further complicated by the fact that throughout the book, the writer toggles between claiming disability and disavowing it as a label that does not apply to him. In one i instance, the rationale is a curious one: "Still for those who know of my condition, I am not disabled. I am a high-functioning person who occasionally shits in his pants." While, as a number of disability scholars have pointed out, even within the umbrella a disability there is a pecking order, it is not often one finds someone who claims that his intellectual accomplishments automatically negate his status as a person with a disability. One would not have to go far to find people with cerebral palsy who would take exception to this. Rawson's parents were fundamentalist Christians who said God told them not to accept SSI money for his son's condition, and while could debate the extent to which this affected his attitudes toward disability, it most definitely set in motion the wheels for his later interest in characters with disability in literary works–the subject of the second section of the book. Because he attended a strict Christian high school whose curriculum only permitted books that could be tied to Christian teachings, Rawson began reading some of the banned books on the sly. Among the most influential on him were The Sound and the Fury and Of Mice and Men. In some respects, the invisibility of characters with disabilities in Rawson's high school reading recapitulates the experience of generations of students for whom the marginalization of literary characters with disabilities in mainstream literary texts as a whole was an invisible fact of education. Rawson's experience that anything he wanted to know about the subject would drive him to seek alternative texts or alternative interpretations of the texts that he had, was essentially the same motivation that since the disability rights movements of the 1970's has driven disability scholars to open up the still new field of disability literature. It is kinship with this growing body of work that makes Rawson's work as a "scholar-gypsy" absorbing. To the characters of Benjy Compton and Lennie Small, Rawson added Raymond Babbit, of Rainman. What he found when he entered college and began studying these text more closely both intrigued and frustrated him. Rawson muses, that he loved these characters… "But I did not understand their behavior. What made them that way. Could they help it…I felt that maybe to understand them was to understand my own condition." What Rawson discovered was that these characters were seen as merely plot devices, they were carriers of the narrative and really revealed little about disability itself. He took it upon himself to see what he could find out. The theory Rawson's book floats is that what makes Benjy Compton, Lenny Small and Raymond Babbitt "fuckheads" is that they have no narrative. As anyone who begins to write about their life or the lives of others knows, the first thing that one needs is a story. Isolated facts in themselves have no meaning. Many writers with disabilities have set about writing about their lives precisely to demonstrate – to those who might think otherwise – that a life with a disability can have meaning and that their stories need to be read. Books such as Harilyn Rousso's Don't Call Me Inspirational Raymond Luczak's Assembly Required and Therese Halscheid's dear father (reviewed in this issu e of Wordgathering) testify to this effort. Despite post-modern sputterings to the contrary, Fuckhead itself appears to be such a narrative. And in a larger sense, the work of literary disability studies scholars in the United States has been to rewrite the narrative of American literature that marginalized or excluded people with disability for so long. When he explores the thought of Benjy, Lenny and Raymond, what Rawson discovers, however, is that no narrative binds together what they experience. Benjy, for example, simply records what he sees and hears without actually understand anything about what is going on. Raymond can't extricate himself from the series of repetitious actions that make up his life, as the famous K-Mart underwear scene reveals. He has memories, but none of them add up to anything. Having come up with this hypothesis about what a fuckhead in literature is, however, Rawson goes on to ask if this is the case, if in fact these characters have no narrative themselves, why–other than as plot devises–are they in the novels. What Rawson proposes is that they are there because they are part of the narrative of the main characters. This is not as simple as their inclusion as a metaphor illustrating that "we are all disabled" to some degree or another. When we get to the books third movement, we understand where the book's title really comes from. It is not merely a generic term of annoyance foisted upon the author by a disgruntled brother as the quote that heads this review implies. It comes from a "Emergency" short story in Denis Johnson's collection Jesus'Son, that impacted Rawson deeply. In that story, the narrator himself has no name and is known only as Fuckhead. It is story that Rawson considers a slant retelling of Of Mice and Men and one that provides more fodder for the theories developed to that point. * * * I've said that Johnson's story impacted Rawson and this is true–but in a slight of hand way. As the title page credits note, all of the images in the book and on the cover are from a film version of Jesus' Son and Rawson quotes freely from the story. If, however, you jump into the book as I did without paying close attention to the back cover, you are in for a jot – one that Rawson undoubtedly counts on. The book is categorized as Faux Memoir/Literary Criticism. What this means is that the reader immediately experiences a conceptual kick. Nothing we have read so far can be counted on as actually having happened. The opinions that the book purports to have been expressing may have no relationship to Rawson's actual view at all. And for that matter, we don't know that the person who wrote the book is actually David Rawson. From a post-modernist perspective, this is a coup. Rawson has reinforced the concept of the irrelevancy of the author. Moreover, it adds greater import to one of the authors opening statements {p.12]. "I have always been of the mind that the novelist is allowed to access all experiences as long as he has something to say." As effective as this approach is, there are a some drawbacks. The first is the old truth that sometimes what makes a passage effective is simply knowing that it is true. Early in the first chapter, for example, Rawson describes his experiences as a young child visiting a store Santa Claus. Santa motioned for me to approach. I limped over to him and climbed up onto his lap, positioning my colostomy bag between my legs. This would be the last time I did not worry about leaving a stain where I sat. He placed his hand on my head and said, "Child, what do you want for Christmas?" And I said, "A butthole." Knowing that this passage may be only a Freyism reduces what could be an occasion for exploring ambivalent feelings to bathroom humor. More significantly, however, are the implications for disability literature. In reclaiming images of disability from literature most writers/scholars have followed Simi Linton's mantra "nothing About us without us." Given the narrator's self-described status as a fuckhead, if he actually did know what it was to like to live with a disability one could (would) his theories might merit some consideration. However, it may be the case Rawson not only disbelieves the ideas postulated in the book but is actually ridiculing them by giving them to such a narrator. One of the quests of disability literature is not merely the introduction of new subject matter, but pushing into new forms for exploring disability. In that regard, there is no doubt that Fuckhead is a success. There is –to my knowledge –nothing quite like it out there in disability literature. In Mantis Dreams, Adam Pottle gave us the disgruntled disability theorist whose literary theories, if not his ethics, were questionable, but by setting his work in diary format, Pottle distances himself from his creation. Rawson goes him one better by conflating author and narrator. Fuckhead has the added advantage of being a slim volume, much more quickly tasted than digested. Whether or one wants to swallow its theories whole, it models the type of creative investigation that disability studies needs and the points it makes about specific literary works provide plenty of fat to chew on.
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